A #diversityfail as an opportunity: guys talking to guys who talk about guys

How can an entrepeneur planning a startup that’s going to develop some revolutionary software that relates to how people work together discover truly game-changing product and business model possibilities? One approach is to look at a situation in a different way than everybody else. Easier said than done, typically … unless you’re lucky enough to discover a collective blindspot in current thinking.

Scott Page’s book The Difference highlights the importance of diversity in situations like this. The way I think of it is that a non-diverse crowd will fail to explore a lot of the possibilities. Strategically the best opportunties are likely to be in the areas that the are getting marginalized today. So whenever I see a #diversityfail related to the “web 2.0” and mobile technology/business world, my ears perk up and I start paying attention.

Alex Iskold’s Free: It Works, It Cries, It Bites on ReadWriteWeb is a roundup of reactions to Chris Anderson’s new book FREE — as well as his own opinion that free can be dangerous. Alex does a nice job summarizing opinions from Malcolm, Seth, Mike, Fred, Mark, and Brad … hey, wait a second, I’m noticing a pattern here …

Alex replied to me on Twitter, asking for links to posts by women and saying he’d be happy to add them. Janet Maslin’s Absolutely, Positively Free … if You Think You Can Afford It from the New York Times was near the top of Google’s main page so I sent him the link — and also suggested that he try reaching out to women. After thanking me, he told me that he thought it was better not to reach out.

Responses like this don’t even surprise me at this point. Shireen Mitchell (aka @digitalsista) of Social Media Women of Color describes this as a “your problem not ours” attitude: we can’t find them, so it’s not our fault. Intelligent women with plenty to say on this subject are out there, and easy to find if you make the effort. If you don’t bother, who else is responsible?

A big problem with not reaching out is that it tends to confirm your own blind spots. For example, in environments where you’re listening primarily to guys, you’re a lot less likely to hear women’s perspectives. Virtually all the commenters on Alex’ ReadWriteWeb post are male; so is just about everybody who replies to or retweets him on Twitter. And a lot of the guys he’s talking with also seem to be the kind of guys who don’t talk a lot with or about women — look at Chris Anderson’s blog and Twitter feed, for example.* The net effect is what network theorists describe as a clique of male nodes with preferential attachment to other male nodes.

Guys talking to guys who talk about guys.

It’s not like this is new behavior. Shelley Powers described it vividly four years ago in Guys don’t link. Plenty of others have documented it too, including me (1, 2). Same old same old. Oh well. However …

From a startup pespective, great products together with a business model that takes advantage of a collective blindspot creates the potential for a unexpectedly huge opportunity that everybody else is overlooking.

Who knows for sure, but it’s distinctly possible that there are a lot of promising variations of “free”-related business models that all the guys talking to each other on the subject haven’t aren’t explore. And there are may also be some aspects of what makes a product great that the guys aren’t paying enough attention to either. With the right people and company culture, there could be some really interesting opportunities here.

So stay tuned for my upcoming post: #diversitywin: pithy title here.

jon

PS: If you want to check out Chris Anderson’s FREE, he’s providing it in a time-limited free version in a variety of formats: a Scribd ebook, Audible audiobooks, and GoogleBooks. If any women — or anybody else whose perspectives aren’t getting heard in the discussions of “free” business models — have any insights, please feel free to share!

** (August 11, 2013) For example, in a discussion about “boost economy sharing” on Authentic Organizations, CV Harquail’s asks what term to use for the situations where a company gives away something to some other company for free in anticipation of some positive return but without expecting a financial return (although there might be one). Deb Lavoy suggested the term “Ante Economy” for this, and Kelley Booth highlights that this is a more accurate term than Freemium for API-based models. And sure enough that perspective isn’t in Alex’s article that led to me writing the thread …

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Tonight I went to the Seattle startup event “The Naked Truth: Show me the money”, with four startups and three pundits talking about revenue models. For example, Picnik’s CEO talked about how challenging their “freemium” business model is, “scratching and clawing for every dollar”. [They earn $2000 for every 100,000 unique visitors to their site — which means that if they get to be bigger than MySpace and attract 100,000,000 visitors they’ll be making a grand total of $2,000,000. Yikes! But I digress.]

Antonia Storr’s excellent interview with Chris Anderson in the Times Online includes this insightful question:

Q: As you were writing the book, and you were blogging all the way through, is it fair to say there was a shift in your thinking from freeconomy to freemium?

A: Yeah. It was probably around the middle of 2008. Freemium was a term coined by Fred Wilson, a venture capitalist. I hadn’t really paid it that much attention initially. I hadn’t focused on cataloguing all the business models out there. Because the ad-driven ones are so obvious, so easy to see. From mid-2008 it became clear that advertising was going to be limited. Not going away, but clearly not going to float all the boats. And I started paying more attention to freemium

So the challenge to the news media, entertainment media, maybe even porn media is the definition of your freemium. Whatever it is that you decide is special enough to charge for best be pretty special. I have a feeling if you listen to your audience, they’ll tell you clearly what they will pay for.

Andrew Erlichson’s Freemium did not work for Phanfare has some details and analysis of why it didn’t. There’s an excellent discussion between Andrew and several other guys in the comments.

There appears to be some interesting male cliquing behavior in and around the “contact management software” area. Plaxo’s management team is all-male. 37signals, makers of Highrise, has only one woman in their dozen employees. Xobni has two women out of 21. And so on. I’m sensing a pattern.

37signals’ book “Getting Real” describes their company philosophy and engineering process in great detail. From idea to implementation talks about starting wi th the question “What is this product going to do? For Basecamp, we looked at our own needs.” Presumably they did with Highrise as well. This a great strategy for building products for people with needs similar to yours. It’s likely, though, that as a result of the lack of diversity of their team, they’re building products that don’t meet the needs of a large portion of the potential target market here.

This is by no means a knock on 37signals, they have thought a lot about the kind of company they want to create and have a great reputation for very high quality software and support. And Plaxo and Xobni are probably fine products as well. But they’re all competing in the “software designed by guys for people who have the same needs as us” market segment. There’s probably a bigger untapped opportunity elsewhere.

W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne distinguish between blue ocean and red ocean strategies. Blue oceans are where you want to be: “the industries not in existence today—the unknown market space, untainted by competition. In blue oceans, demand is created rather than fought over.” What we’ve discovered here is a (potential) unknown market opportunity in a very lucrative space. I’m not sure “blue ocean” is the right term for this particular situation, though, because of the gender factor: in Ronna Lichtenberg’s terminology, the companies already competing in this space are likely to be biased towards “blue” organization and communication styles, and that’s not where we want to be.

So maybe it would be better to call it a “pink ocean” strategy.

10/10/10: Since originally writing this I used 37 Signals products on a couple of projects and sure enough, there’s a noticeable gender-linked difference in how people tend to react to it. At least in my experience, men are much more likely than women to find it intuitive and approve of the functional style. Women are more likely to find it confusing or irritating or hard-to-use, and find the user interface flat rather than appealing. Of course there are plenty of exceptions in both directions, and it wasn’t a scientific survey … but on the whole I view it as good evidence that a pink ocean strategy would work here.

It turns out that the copies of Free on Scribd and Kindle are region-locked, so not available outside of the US. Guess I should have called this “US-based guys talking to US-based guys who talk about US-based guys”.

[…] Liminal states Jon’s blog, currently green in solidarity with the advocates for justice, freedom, and democracy in Iran « A #diversityfail as an opportunity: guys talking to guys who talk about guys […]

[…] danah’s excellent essay, and another by Paul Graham that I’ll discuss below, provide a great chance to expand on the strategic importance of diversity that I started discussing in Qworky: the adventure begins and Guys talking to guys who talk about guys. […]

Shifting focus slightly to the technology-in-politics world … there were a lot of kudos for Sunlight Foundation’s coverage of the Open Government Directive announcement today. The analysis was excellent, but have a look at a screenshot of the video and chat room and see if anything jumps out at you:

Hey wait a second, I’m noticing a pattern here. I mentioned this in the chat room, but the moderators didn’t put my comment through. I also tweeted it to the #diversityfail hashtag, where a couple of guys didn’t seem concerned but a couple of women agreed with me … pattern? Did somebody say “pattern”?

Interesting read, thanks for forwarding. Don’s intro sets the context nicely. Leo and Bruce both make some good points, and illustrate them with quotes from Howard, Jerry, and Noam and references to George, Al, Joseph, John Paul, Al, Thomas, Chief Joseph, Leonard, Rush, Glenn, Robert, Aldous, George, Ivan, Saul, “a long list of school critics from Henry to John, John, Paul, Jonathan, Alfie, Ivan, and John,” and the Dicks (Cheney and Nixon).

Hey, wait a second, I’m noticing a pattern here.

I wonder whether a more diverse group might have come up with some better answers to the subtitle’s question of “What are we doing wrong?”

In the intro, Don does cite an article by Alternet contributor Adele Stan. Alas, the link is broken.

Update, a couple days later: I tweeted a comment on this to Alternet and Don Hazen. They didn’t respond. Oh well. I wonder if they’re too depressed, or just failing to organize effectively?

The largest Silicon Valley companies lost more than one in ten black and Hispanic employees from 2000 to 2005, leaving their workforces just 7 percent black and Hispanic, even as their overall employment grew 16 percent, accoring to federal employment data obtained by the San Jose Mercury News. And that’s among the 10 companies who allowed the newspaper’s Freedom of Information Act Request to clear the Labor Department. One would presume the situation is even worse at stonewalling Apple, Google, Oracle, Yahoo and Applied Materials, though the firms insist they are merely protecting trade secrets. It’s entirely possible that Apple CEO Steve Jobs, for example, is hiding a very diverse workforce behind this management team:

December 2011: If you ask Apple’s new Siri search tool where to get Viagra or a blow job, it’s got great answers. If you ask it where to get contraception, it’s baffled. If you ask it where to get an abortion, it directs you to pro-life “clinics” that will try to talk you out of getting an abortion. Apple calls it a “glitch” (just like Amazon did with #amazonfail). On Forbes, Amanda Marcotte weighs in with Siri is Sexist:

Siri behaves much like a retrograde male fantasy of the ever-compliant secretary: discreet, understanding, willing to roll with any demand a man might come up with, teasingly accepting of dirty jokes. Oh yeah, and mainly indifferent to the needs of women….

In response to complaints about this, Apple spokeswoman Natalie Kerris explained, “These are not intentional omissions meant to offend anyone.” Well, exactly. I doubt many people seriously believe that the programmers behind Siri are out to get women. The problem is that the very real and frequent concerns of women simply didn’t rise to the level of a priority for the programmers. Even though far more women will seek abortion in their lives than men will seek prostitutes, even though more women use contraception than men use Viagra, and even though exponentially more women use contraception than men seek prostitutes, the programmers were far more worried about making sure the word “horny” puts you in contact with a prostitute (a still-illegal activity) than the word “abortion” puts you in contact with someone who could do that for you legally.

The problem isn’t that anyone involved with this hates women. The problem is that they just don’t think about women very much. Siri’s programmers clearly imagined a straight male user as their ideal and neglected to remember the nearly half of iPhone users who are female.

If you look at Bezos, or [Netscape Communications Corp. founder Marc] Andreessen, [Yahoo Inc. co-founder] David Filo, the founders of Google, they all seem to be white, male, nerds who’ve dropped out of Harvard or Stanford and they absolutely have no social life. So when I see that pattern coming in — which was true of Google — it was very easy to decide to invest.

Vivek Wadhwa’s February 7 Silicon Valley: You and Some of Your VC’s have a Gender Problem on TechCrunch came out at about the same time as Mike’s and Ryan’s articles, and complements them nicely. It previews the results of a project Vivek did with National Center for Women & Information Technology and Kauffman Foundation, links to Cindy Padnos’ white paper for Illuminate Ventures, and quotes Sharon Vosmek of Astia extensively on systemic bias.
It’s also a great teaser for the late summer Arrington kerfuffle I covered in Fretting, asking, and begging isn’t a plan, where I quote Vivek several times.

Women own 40 percent of the private businesses in the United States, according to the Center for Women’s Business Research. But they create only 8 percent of the venture-backed tech start-ups, according to Astia, a nonprofit group that advises female entrepreneurs.

“It’s not like people are making an effort to exclude people, but I see very little diversity in the candidate pool,” says Aileen Lee, a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, the big venture capital firm.

Why yes, that’s the same Kleiner Perkins whose John Doerr talks about how he looks to invest in white guys because he sees that as a pattern of success. Gee. You don’t think that could have anything to do with why they don’t get a diverse pool?

Update, August 19: In another thread, Cathy Brooks commented that many women in Silicon Valley, including her, felt this article was full of terrible holes. We got a chance to chat a bit about this in person at pii2010, and she added that by focusing solely on the negative, it had wasted a huge opportunity. She also mentioned that Claire Cain Miller did another article a few weeks later on the tech scene in Boulder — and didn’t mention any women.

”We have a two-year program here, and we try like hell to hire women into that program,” says Union Square Ventures’ Wilson (whose office, except for his assistant, is all male). “We tell the world we’ve got this opening, and anybody who’s interested can apply, and it’s 90 percent men who even bother to apply. I mean, I don’t know what the problem is.”

On Mediaite, Rachel Sklar responds

Imagine for a moment that Fred Wilson just gave a start-up a big chunk of money, and a goal. If that goal was 90% a failure, do you think it would be enough if they were just “trying like hell?” If you “don’t know what the problem is,” you tackle it and find out. Fred Wilson knows that, it’s how every single startup is born. But that problem has to first be a priority.

As for “telling the world” — well, it depends how you define “world.” Wilson has advertised it in his popular wee-hours email (see here and here) and on the Union Square Ventures blog (see here and here), but that seems only to be telling his world. And if that world reaches 90% men and you’re trying to bring in women, then maybe a different solution is required.

Yeah really. From earlier in the New York article:

“Men refer men,” says 29-year-old Elizabeth Stark, a Brown and Harvard Law grad who teaches law and technology classes at Yale. “You have to directly address the problem, or you won’t change it. So if we just keep it status quo, for all the reasons defined in these self-reinforcing networks, they will stay self-reinforcing with the white, geeky, male, Stanford/Harvard-dropout types.”

It seems that way to me too. I’m not sure if there’s a specific recent igniter; it’s more like critical mass has been reached. Allyson, Shireen, and many other women in technology and their allies have been steadily pursuing a strategy of documenting inequities, highlighting them via new and traditional media, and engaging with others who see the value of change. Sure the cards are totally stacked in favor of the existing Kyriarchy, but still: with such a highly motivated, competent, and diverse group of people working towards a goal which adds a huge amount of value to society, it’s not surprising that there’s starting to be a sense of momentum.

As usual, Shireen was onto something: there is a lot of momentum. The successes of organizations like Women 2.0 have a lot to do with it; Adriana Gardella’s Women and Growing Companies has some very useful links. Brad Feld’s The Discussion About The Lack of Women In Tech quotes National Center for Women in Technology CEO Lucy Sanders as saying that we’re five years into a 20 year shift but it seems to me that things are about to start moving a lot more quickly.

Tereza Nemessanyi’s XX Combinator on Mashups, Markets, and Motherhood responded to Scott Duke Harris’ Mercury News article Startup boot camp illustrates dearth of women in tech by suggesting “a Y combinator for women”. Good idea! Y Combinator’s heavily skewed demographics lead collective and self-reinforcing blind spots that mirroring the biases of traditional VCs and the power structures of large companies. There are all kinds of pink ocean opportunites for an XX combinator … Fred Wilson is potentially interested in funding something and adds perspective from his wife Gotham Girl, who talks to and works with a lot of 40 something women entrepreneurs and tells him that this group is “breaking out.” A video interview with Tereza (XX Combinator comes up 4 1/2 minutes into it) and the discussion on Hacker News have more.*

Jessica Bruder’s We Need More Female Venture Capitalists in Forbes Woman also quotes investors Cindy Padnos of Illuminate and Amy Erret of Maveron along with Astia CEO Sharon Vosmek. A comment calls her a feminazi so it is certainly worth a read. Closing the Venture Capital Gender Gap in BusinessWeek goes into more detail on Astia, a non-profit focused on accelerating funding and growth for women-led businesses.

For those of you keeping score at home, that’s coverage within a couple of weeks in the Mercury News, Forbes, Business Week, and interest from several high-profile star investors. In classic business strategy terms, we’re crossing the chasm and are about to be inside the tornado: it’s where fortunes are made and dominant market positions can be won — or lost, as the case may be. Gotta like that.

September 10: Fred Wilson asked for advice on how to be contrarian, and I commented that

XX Combinator idea is a great approach for generating well-thought out contrarian investment opportunities. So another strategy for being contrarian is to put the time into thinking how that [or something with similar goals] could work and follow it up with investment.

One would like to think that he and Union Square Ventures are already doing that, but it can’t hurt to suggest it 🙂

Also, not sure how I missed this earlier, but Stacey Higginbotham’s Is There a Female Funding Model? on GigaOm, from August 10, is a good followup to Tereza’s post.

While the service has seen substantial growth since going mobile, it could face stiff competition in the near future. Hot Potato, a service with much of the same “check-in to anything” functionality, was recently acquired by Facebook….

Facebook’s sheer size could spell trouble for GetGlue, but the startup’s ace-in-the-hole could be its powerful recommendation engine, which Hot Potato lacks. As users check-in and like things on GetGlue, they are fed increasingly better recommendations based on their interests and those of their friends. This leads to more check-ins, creating a powerful feedback-loop for the service.

True, although one of the risks of a feedback loop like this is that it if you don’t have a diverse group of participants originally, it can be challenging to broaden your audience later. There’s been a lot of attention recently to checkin competitor FourSquare’s gender ratio: 80% guys. So there’s a huge opportunity here for GetGlue if they can reach a more diverse audience. On the other hand it also highlights a huge potential advantage for Facebook: while there’s plenty of room for improvement, they have very good gender diversity in their user base.

* Alex was the author of the article that I originally responded to in this post, many many months ago

Chris and Michael have some perspectives from Jonathan, Yuri, Steve, and so on. There’s also a companion debate between Tim and John.

Hey wait a second, I’m noticing a pattern here.

Maybe they don’t know any women. Maybe they don’t think that any women have anything useful to say. Or maybe they’re just so used to talking to guys who talk about guys that they — and everybody that reviewed and edited the article — don’t even notice the pattern or think about its implications.

Well, maybe it’s just MediaGazer — who like techmeme is known for their gender bias. So I checked Google instead, and found articles by Fred, Richi, Steve, Shane, Tim, Sam, John, Rob, Chris, Nate, and Evann along with Caron Carlson in FierceCIO and Helen A. S. Popkin on MSNBC.

And of course, a lot of the guys link to each other, but I couldn’t find any links to Nitasha or Caron, and only one to Helen (an uncredited story in Periscope Post ). For more on this phenomenon, see Shelley Powers’ classic Guys don’t link.

Meanwhile on Twitter, @missrogue and @jescarter thought I had brought up a good point, and Tracy Viselli had a theory for what’s going on:

@comradity tweeted me that I had been quoted in a comment on Fred Wilson’s post, so I checked that out too. Fred shares perspectives from Howard and Saul. I waded through out the comments from Dave, andy, Niccai, Richard, Morgan, Aviah, afinanceguy, scottythebody, Eric, Mark, and Steven before giving up.

Hey wait a second. I’m noticing a pattern here …

Funny, though. None of the bloggers or commenters seem to have noticed the gender imbalance.

Investors at Tuesday’s event in Mountain View, Calif., included Ron Conway, Jeff Clavier and Mike Maples and venture firms such as Accel Partners, Greycroft Partners and First Round Capital…. This year the graduating class includes experienced entrepreneurs such as Steve Huffman, who founded Reddit and now has co-founded Hipmunk …. [inDinero] has raised $500,000 from angels including Keith Rabois, Kevin Hartz and David Wu, an Intuit executive … [The Fridge] has raised more than $500,000 in seed funding from angels including Mitch Kapor, Keith Rabois, Jim Young, Jeremy Stoppelman, Jameson Hsu, Geoff Ralston, Jason Sander, Joshua Schachter and Naval Ravikant.*

Hmm. InDinero was co-founded by Jessica Mah (who along with Amanda Peyton of Message Party is one of the very few women co-founders in this years crop of 36 Y Combinator companies) but I guess she wasn’t important enough to mention. But at least women aren’t totally absent from the coverage. Tomio mentions that Demi Moore was there with her husband, actor-turned-investor Ashton Kutcher.

The name-dropping also was rife yesterday, with Silicon Valley celebrities like Paul Buchheit, Mitch Kapor, Dave McClure, Keith Rabois, and Naval Ravikant mentioned over and over as early investors as the pitches progressed.

At the risk of being pedantic for a moment: a success like this is a particularly good example of several aspects of structural oppression that it is not always so easy to see. inDinero and Jessica both benefit hugely from being involved with YCombinator. 90% of the people that have a chance to benefit from that are guys. And as Alexia reports:

Confirmed investors in the round (which still has three open spots reserved for valley VIPs like SV Angel) include 500 StartUps‘ Dave McClure, Microsoft’s Fritz Lanman, and YouTube’s Jawed Karim.

if inDinero is as successful as it seems like it will be, its early investors will come out way ahead. As they should: they spotted a winner early on and seem to be doing a good job nuturing it. But once again, 90% of the people benefitting from this are guys. Thus does patriarchy reproduce itself.

“One advantage startups have over established companies is that there are no discrimination laws about starting businesses. For example, I would be reluctant to start a startup with a woman who had small children, or was likely to have them soon. But you’re not allowed to ask prospective employees if they plan to have kids soon. Whereas when you’re starting a company, you can discriminate on any basis you want about who you start it with.”

September 8: Tomio’s got a follow-up article on YCombinator in the Wall Street Journal. In the opening paragraph he talks about who was in attendance (investors Ron and Mike, celebrities Ashton and Demi) and quotes investor Jeff Clavier and YCombinator founder Paul Graham, and ends with a couple of paragraphs on Steve and Hipmunk.

My startup http://www.ifwerantheworld.com – a simple web-meets-world platform designed to turn good intentions into action, one microaction at a time – is what I describe as ’emotional software’: the synthesis of technology and psychology.

My startup team is 4 women, 3 men. My head of user experience, my designer and my programmer are all female.

It was a long hard slog to get my startup funded – I represent a double whammy of VC unfundability: female AND older 🙂

I mentor and advise many female entrepreneurs of all ages. They struggle too – with startups that are highly innovative and creative but not the ‘next Foursquare/Twitter’ template male VCs and investors are looking for.

You know about the Politico piece a couple of weeks ago on political bloggers who run for office? Primary source included a post I wrote on The Moderate Voice, plus a more than hour interview with me by the writer? And “all I got was my lousy city name in the article” while 11 men were mentioned (and two other women). When Alan Rosenblatt and I were trying to ID poli bloggers who’d run, for a while, it appeared I was in fact the only woman who’d done it (and won) at the level I’m at (many under the radar possibilities out there too though – state party orgs for example).

So – it’s a media coverage thing as well, as I know you know. Very many layers to attack.

Cindy, I firmly believe that more diverse teams come up with better experiences for everybody, so I’m really looking forward to seeing where If We Ran the World goes — it’s off to a very promising start. Great point about other dimensions of oppression too. I’m mostly talking about gender in this thread but age, race, ableism, and language all have similar patterns. And I also work with a lot of women of all ages who have similar struggles — as entreneneurs or as politicians, as Jill points out.

Jill, a great example — infuriating I’m sure. Appropriation and failure to credit are huge issues. And I’m sure they thought their photograph at the top was fair and balanced because it had progressive and conservative white guys.

[I was once quoted in The Economist in an article on software engineering with 12 other guys and no women. When I mentioned this afterwards to the author, he said yeah, there were a couple in his original article but they got edited out. Sigh. And of course as I highlight in my blog post there were plenty of women whose input would have been very valuable … but I digress.]

More positively, a very good thing about the Politico article was that it focused on the Blogher conference panel as empowering women who wouldn’t otherwise have considered running for office.

“Part of changing the ratio is just changing awareness, so that the next time Techcrunch is planning a Techcrunch Disrupt, they won’t be able to not see the overwhelming maleness of it,” said Ms. Sklar, referring to the influential tech conference.

Yup – the Politico writer tweeted that it was a space issue. So I said well, my name is 17 characters and Pepper Pike is 11 – give me a break. (Pepper Pike, Ohio is in fact 17). Not to mention I am a paid freelance writer, I know how these things work. Don’t BS me. Whatev. Yes, need to move on – but that does not mean making a point to highlight these instances. Just crazy in 2010, crazy.

[…] I think of articles like this as a fascinating snapshot of how privilege, combined with the “guys talking to guys who talk about guys” cliquing behavior, leads to a remarkably convenient blind spot for Arrington — as well […]

In the morning, I basically check two things. The obvious one is Twitter. I use Tweet Deck for friends, commentators and media outlets. The people I followed after seeing their tweets were @mike_FTW, Paul Kedrosky, Joe Solomon and Newt Gingrich.

After I scan Twitter I check Netvibes, a module-based RSS reader. It’s a lovely piece of software. My main source for world news is Al Jazeera…. I look for relevant research, interesting themes and funny stories on sites like 3quarksdaily, Crooked Timber, Boing Boing and Slashdot…. The only blog I read where I read it for a specific blogger’s voice is Sady Doyle at Tiger Beatdown. I’ve read every word that Sady’s written. She would be number one. If I had to pick two other bloggers it’d be Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing and Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber….

And Jay (with an excerpt from his Twitter list of “best mindcasters” on the right — nice to see @kegill there!):

When I get to the office I plug in my laptop and immediately check Twitter: first the messages sent to or about @jayrosen_nyu, and then two Twitter lists I have built for this purpose: Top Journalism Linkers, and Best Mindcasters I Know….. Then I will check my Twitter stream itself, about 600 accounts that help me track things on my “beat”– press criticism, new media, political journalism.

It’s not something that we went out with a strategy to accomplish. Rather it was something that developed through the natural process by which we invest…. Biases are detrimental to making good investment decisions. When we looked at VMWare, we looked at a company with a very unique solution to a fundamental problem and we ended up funding Diane Greene

Good call. As Marylene comments, a good precedent is always encouraging. Azure currently funds Deidre Paknad (of PSS Systems, Karen Vergura at ezRez, Tracy Randall at Cooking.com, Lisa Stone et. al. of BlogHer, and “another great woman whose name will be disclosed soon.” Oooh! The suspense is killing me!

There’s a great example of the value of not just talking to guys, too. Cameron describes how “insight into what’s happening in the female community, particularly as it relates to social media” influenced their strategy for investing in the social media space starting in 2006:

instead of trying to invest in the early adopter demographics, we looked at the most valuable demographics from an advertizing perspective and found out that women controlled over 80% of all consumer purchases. To be ahead of the curve, we looked at companies that would address these demographics. Our first investment is more related to parents, and is Education.com, a company that we incubated. The other was BlogHer.

Impressive! And a good example of the kind of self-reinforcing cycle you can create here: these CEOs are likely to recommend their contacts, and businesses led by women and minorities who are looking for VCs who will evaluate them fairly and be supportive are likely to seek out Azure Capital. Sounds like a competitive advantage to me.

[…] and I met in a very social network-y way. Tara Hunt (aka @missrogue) tweeted a link to my blog post Guys talking to guys who talk about guys. Cindy saw it, left a comment on my blog, and we connected via Twitter and Facebook and Skype. I […]

More positively, Mike Cassidy’s Let’s keep talking about venture funding for women in the San Jose Mercury News talks about the “uncomfortable truth that companies led by women receive only a sliver of the venture capital dished out each year.” Mike quotes Jennifer Zeszut, who recently sold her startup Scout Labs:

“I think it’s important to keep talking about this because if we just do what’s comfortable and we never get outside our comfort zone, I think we as a country and a society are never going to harness and tap the great ideas that are out there,” says Zeszut, whose San Francisco startup tracked and characterized the Internet and social network buzz about client companies. “We should be trying to find the best business ideas in the world, whether they come from a man or a woman.”

87% of the U.S’s top 101 companies have one or more women on their executive committees. But — and this is a big but — only 15% of the people who answer directly to the CEO are women. Moreover, most of those women (139 out of 193) are not directly in frontline profit-and-loss roles, but in support positions: human resources, communications or legal. “It’s hardly a basis for continued improvement of gender balance in the future, where P&L experience is a prerequisite for leadership,” says Avivah Wittenberg-Cox, CEO of 20-First.

Haha, I ran into this recently, Jon. Had my eye on a conference that was affordable, on-point, and came with In-n-Out catered daily ( http://valiocon.com/ ). The speaker lineup? 8 white dudes. Blah.

When I tried to bring it up, I got a minor stonewalling, assuring they know of two people coming from other countries. I’ll try and write about this soon on my own site and link to it here, but it’s just a bit frustrating. It seems to be the state of the tech industry in general.

According to early reviews on Hacker News, the overhelmingly-male news site that along with Quora is one of community hubs of the “YC mafia”, it’s a great portrait of Paul and laud him for “giving back to the community in such a sustainable, profitable way.” Reactions on Forbes are also positive, at least so far.

And indeed there’s some very good stuff here, including the description of how said YC mafia protect and collaborate each other and “regard Graham as their sensei”. There’s also pithy language from Paul in What it takes on what he looks for in founders: a willingness to give up on their dreams, caring about big moral questions but not “observing proprieties”, cockroach-like determination, and “delight in breaking rules–but not rules that matter”. And while it’s not for the squeamish, Paul also very explicit about what he looks for in the hot 10-minute session founders go through with all five YC partners bearing down on and asking questions: “tissue turgor.” And no proprieties! It really paints a picture.

Plus the article leaves out the key insight into YC’s “secret sauce” (aka competitive advantage). It’s from a footnote Paul’s 2005 Harvard talk/essay How to Start a Startup, which as Christopher recounts eventually inspired YC’s formation

One advantage startups have over established companies is that there are no discrimination laws about starting businesses. For example, I would be reluctant to start a startup with a woman who had small children, or was likely to have them soon. But you’re not allowed to ask prospective employees if they plan to have kids soon. Whereas when you’re starting a company, you can discriminate on any basis you want about who you start it with.

I feel like I’m in an abusive relationship with you. I love you. You’re charming, attractive and smart, everything I could ever want in a magazine. My heart skips a beat when I see a new issue in my mailbox. Most of the time, you’re harmless, and I tell everyone I know how awesome you are. But every now and then, you slip, and you make me feel very bad, make me question my judgment….

This isn’t the first time. We’ve been through this before. Your covers aren’t all that friendly to women on a regular basis, and that makes me sad. There was naked Pam from The Office in 2008 (you thought you were so clever with that acetate overlay – I mean, how else would you depict transparency?). In 2003, you had the nice lady covered in synthetic diamonds. There were the sexy manga ladies and LonelyGirl15 and Julia Allison with their come-hither looks. And Uma Thurman, she’s a lady, and she was on the cover… But wait, that was for a character she was playing in a film based on a Philip K. Dick novel….

So, I’m breaking up with you. As much as it pains me, really, deeply pains me, I can no longer stick around for this abuse. Had this been an isolated incident, a clever and provocative way to introduce an article, I might be able to forgive you and move on. But how many chances do I have to give you before you grow up? Or before I wise up? I’ve got the kids to think about…I’m doing this for them.

I still love you. I think I need you, and I’m not sure I can live without you. But you left me with no choice.

I looked at the article, which described a series of court cases. “Umm … they’ve appealed, might appeal some more …”

“No, look at the contributors.”

“Stewart Baker’s there! Good to see him get work!”

“What else?”

I looked at it for quite a while.

Eventually she laughed and said “They’re all guys. Not a woman in sight.”

There’s plenty of women who have a lot to say about topics they discuss on the Volokh Conspiracy. Off the top of our head we came up with Jennifer Grannick, Andrea Matwyshyn, Susan Brenner, Cindy Cohn … the list goes on.

Jessi Hempel’s excellent Trouble @Twitter in Fortune (subtitled “Boardroom power plays, disgruntled founders, and CEO switcheroos are clipping the wings of this tech high flier”) talks about the drama between Ev and Jack, Dick’s role, flatlining numbers, and in general paints a picture of a company that’s at risk despite its huge successes. Here’s an excerpt:

Twitter’s board members are a high-powered crew. Besides William, Dorsey, and Costolo, the board includes venture capitalists Peter Fenton, Fred Wilson, and Bijan Sabet, former Netscape CFO Peter Currie, former Doubleclick CEO David Rosenblatt, and Flipboard founder Mike McCue. These alpha males disagree about a lot of things, according to many sources, but they all agreed not to sell Twitter. Indeed, in a hotly contested financing round, the company raised another $200 million led by Kleiner Perkins at a $3.7 billion valuation. When the company accepted the financing, management and the existing board felt that Kleiner partner John Doerr did not belong on the board. He is a board member at Google, which is a potential acquirer of Twitter, and a source of future employees. Instead, Twitter and Kleiner Perkins decided they’d choose two mutually agreed-upon representatives to join Twitter’s board.

That’s why it was odd that when the January board meeting rolled around, Doerr showed up. No one will say whether he was invited — and no one there told him to go home. Instead, the board called a private executive session after the official board meeting to hash out the more sensitive business. Asked about this directly, Costolo said he would not discuss it, and Doerr didn’t return requests for an interview

The mind reels … with the rumors of a high-level Google mole at Twitter and the obvious conflict-of-interest Doerr’s behavior — and the board’s — could be the basis for some serious lawsuits if things get nasty. But really, what did the Twitter guys think was going to happen when they took money from KPMG? Too funny. Jerry Kaplan’s classic Startup has some great descriptions of Doerr’s behavior board meetings so I’m sure it was entertaining. As Roxy Music once said, boys will be boys will be boys.

Take a step back, though. The majority of Twitter users are women, and as Aileen Lee discussed last month on TechCrunch, women are seen as the most valuable demographic online. How many women are involved in the executive-level discussions about Twitter’s future? Blacks, Latin@s, and other minorities are huge Twitter users. Where are they?

In a environment 53%-female …. 100% of the Twitter key people, who presumably benefit the most from all of this, are male.

Since then, while continuing to attract more users and investment, they haven’t really taken advantage of the situation. The product isn’t much better than it was — a little more reliable, and lists are nice, but on the whole it’s stagnant. Now Twitter’s shut off innovation in the ecosystem and annoyed developers by claiming ownership of the user experience. And of course there’s the Dickbar. The COO’s running the company, the alpha males are jousting, Ev’s left in a huff after taking six months off, forgotten co-founder Noah’s talking about the past, and Jack’s back to lead products part-time while also being part-time CEO at his hot new payments startup Square. Hmmm.

No one wants to say Twitter is in trouble. That’s like shooting your best friend’s dog.

Of course it is not like Twitter’s at risk in the short term. Biz’ response in The Trouble Bubble is that criticism is to be expected, and “now it’s our job to prove the reporters wrong so they can write an article later about how we have made dramatic progress.” Fair enough; KPMG, where John Doerr finds it easier to invest in white guys, has given them quite a lot of cash in the bank. If they decide to exit, the white guys running and investing in Google (who bought Ev’s previously company) are paying a lot for companies run by ex-Googlers, and the white guys running and investing in Facebook presumably would offer a lot more for Twitter now. Biz and the boys will probably come out okay.

But I gotta say, they might want to be talking with somebody other than alpha males about how to move things forward.

Alas it turns out that Martin’s “three times more innovative” results were just for occupational diversity. His results for demographic diversity: “With the exception of product novelty, groups that exhibit a high level of diversity in ethnicity, gender, and occupational class are only 20-40 percent as likely to exhibit innovative behaviors or strategies as those with no demographic diversity.” Hmm.

The Internet is not controlled by anyone or anything. It is a highly distributed global network that has at its core the concepts of free speech and individual liberty. This ethos, which includes but is not limited to hacker culture, is in many ways at odds with big companies, instiutions, and governments which seek to control, regulate, and “civilize” the Internet.

In the middle east, we’ve seen the power of the Internet in the Arab Spring. I believe we are in for a lot more of that sort of thing and that it will not be limited to repressive governments, but to all large institutions that seek to control people and their free will.

Humans whose physical needs are met yearn to be confident and happy. The current web processes facts but not emotions and is not set help humans, in a scalable way, advance further upward to L4 (Esteem) and L5 (Self Actualization). The next wave will take facilitate and curate emotional snippets, helping individuals process them so they can evolve to the next level. It’s kind of like taking various aspects of therapy online, and employing game mechanics and the power of mobile to manage emotions on the go and reduce stress.

Some brilliant startups solving for dimensions of this in very clever ways: How to make your relationships better? How to identify, understand and moderate your feelings? How to make better personal decisions that are true to you? (this last one is HonestlyNow so I like to put us in this group). Incidentally, it’s a gaggle of insanely accomplished women hatching these — former VCs, early YouTubers, early AOLers. It turns out last fall Vinod Khosla said the next wave would be grounded in emotions. Hmmmm.

Google+ launched in a limited field test a few days ago. Via Beth Kanter, Steve Rubel, and Susan Merrit I discovered the SocialStatistics’ “leaderboard” which lists the people on Google+ with the most followers: Mark, Larry, Vic, Sergey, Robert … hey wait a second, I’m noticing a pattern here!

As Kathy E. Gill pointed out, Google’s algorithms tend to favor people in the echo chamber. To which I would add: especially guys.

As I mention in Diversity and Google+: A Work in Progress, there’s been a lot of discussion about gender ratios on Google+. After initial reports that the population was 88% male, a new analysis suggests that it’s currently “only” 66% male. Here’s how it’s getting reported:

As Audrey Watters comments on Google+, “Why aren’t there more women in tech, women on G+? It’s a total mystery!”

[…] And network effects magnify the impact. The more of your friends who aren’t on Google+, or only use it in just a limited way, the less likely you are to spend a lot of time there.* So especially since the initial population’s mostly guys, Google+ on a path to become a place that appeals primarily to guys who prefer to talk to guys. […]

I cannot WAIT to read more of this. I mean, you just know so much about this. So much of it Ive never even thought of. You sure did put a new twist on something that Ive heard so much about. I dont believe Ive actually read anything that does this subject as good justice as you just did.
It’s a shame you don’t have a donate button! I’d most certainly donate to this fantastic blog! I guess for now i’ll settle for book-marking and adding your RSS feed to my Google account. I look forward to brand new updates and will share this website with my Facebook group. Chat soon!

Edit by Jon: Yes, it’s spam. So I deleted the link. But I nonetheless appreciated the sentiment — so much more positive than most spam!

Robert’s emerged as one of the very few bloggers defending Google’s naming policy. I ended A tale of two searches with a rhetorical question about why why Robert, Joseph, Bradley, and Vic can’t see the anti-woman, anti-lgbtq, etc., biases in their policy. There’s no single reason, of course, but I think the “guys talking to guys who talk about guys” phenomenon has a lot to do with it.

Robert’s circle of Tech Bloggers and Journalists is over 80% male — just like his “Tech Leaders and Influencers” Facebook group. So is it any surprise that he reacts to Google’s unfair suspension of Skud’s and Identity Woman’s account with a shrug? And he, Joseph, and Vic are buddies from way back; so of course they listen to his feedback. Yeah, a lot of people are upset about the policy, a lot of their most passionate early users are leaving or have had their accounts suspended, but Robert’s reassuring them that most people are like him and prefer that Google check people’s IDs rather then let anybody use the same name they do on Twitter or with their friends. Strangely enough though most of the women I talk to feel differently.

Google+ just introduced a new “suggested users” list. While there are some great picks on their like Lynette Young, Violet Blue, Sarah Perez, Beth Kanter, A. V. Flox, and Jillian C. York … overall it’s mostly guys. Here’s their Politics section:

Breaking Development focuses on new, emerging techniques for web development and design for mobile devices. Our speakers are hand-picked to make sure you get challenging, well-delivered talks from a variety of different perspectives.

The über-specific use of hashtags as exact markers was, to a great extent, a bug rather than a feature; e.g., it forces people to always type the hashtag perfectly for it to work at all. In web search you would never expect “dog” and “dogs” to give you radically different answers; likewise in social products, you shouldn’t expect #foo and foo to give you radically different answers.

Don’t you just love it when guys tell you what you should expect? It’s a good example of how Google doesn’t “get social”, ignoring the rich complexity of ways that people use hashtags and instead seeing them primarily as ugly-but-efficient shorthand for a search.

And wait a second …

October 19: There were some good followon conversations on G+ (1, 2, ), and to his credit Yonatan engaged in all three, including this:

Yeah, I’ve definitely noticed that commenters on posts around technical issues tend to be overwhelmingly male. It seems to depend on the subject; when I post about economics or politics, it’s also fairly male-heavy, but music or science gets more balance. My private posts get significantly more female commenters, but that may also say a lot about who my friends are. (OTOH, +1’s and reshares tend to be gender-balanced or even skew female)

I’m not sure if there’s a more general phenomenon about women versus men commenting on public posts. It wouldn’t surprise me if there were a bit of a dynamic around very busy public comment threads not seeming like very pleasant places to post, and women being more likely to want to fork off their own discussions and threads via reshare. (This is the sort of thing we could, and probably should, study statistically)

So what do you think? Is there something I could do in my public posts to encourage more women to comment and participate? I don’t want to be posting to a locker room.

There were a lot of suggestions from me and others. It’ll be interesting to see how much they influence his behavior.

Ron Conway of Silicon Valley Angel has showed up a few times in this thread …. Forbes managed to get ahold of a list of all of SV Angel’s investments. Of the 260 companies, I only saw five (including Wordnik, TRUSTe, blip.tv) with women founders.

I have done more for the cause of women in tech than almost anyone. Spoke up before others dared; took intense fire; did what was right — Vivek Wadhwa

Mr. Wadhwa began writing about women in tech in 2010, after his wife pointed out how few women were at the Crunchies, an annual awards show for start-ups. He had been researching entrepreneurship and immigration, but he found the women-in-tech issue to be an unexplored niche.

Well no, not actually. The MIT Report on women in technology was in the 1980s. Susan Herring and others did fundamental research in the 1990s and early 2000s. The Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing has been going on since 1994 and the Anita Borg Institute for Women in Technology was founded in 1997. Unlocking the Clubhouse was published in 2003. Catalyst publshed a highly-influential report in 2005. And the list goes on … apologies to all the other women (and occasional guys) I’m eliding in this abbreviated summary.

Nitasha Tiku’s Interview with a Wadhwa on The Verge has a good summary of the context here:

The blowback cycle started as a reaction to Newsweek's recent cover story about sexism in Silicon Valley, where Wadhwa described women as "humble," "practical," self-effacing non-"nerds," who needed to be reassured they are "wonderful." He meant it as praise, but it came across as condescending and facile.

Critics say he misrepresents women in the industry and, worse, takes up their space on the page. Amelia Greenhall, co-founder of Double Union, a hacker space for women in San Francisco, had laid out the case recently in a widely read blog post. She argued that Wadhwa's role as the go-to quote machine on women in Silicon Valley is self-serving — and that his aggressive dismissal of those who challenged his expertise was hurting the people he claimed to help. "Vivek seems to interpret such criticism from influential technical women as ‘silencing,'" she wrote, "when by appointing himself the unwanted spokesman for women in tech he has kept actual, qualified women's voices from being heard widely in the mainstream media."

…

The aversion to Wadhwa as an ally had been an open secret among women in tech, a gray-area grievance shared mostly off the record — perhaps because of the need for male allies, perhaps because they didn't want to be scolded for their angry tweets. Only a few women publiclyargued that it was time for him to pass the mic.

And now that's what he says he'll do. In his Monday Washington Post column (and an extended version posted on VentureBeat and his personal blog), Vivek discusses why he’s “stepping out of the debate on women on technology”.

More positively, Farhad’s article in the New York Times has perspectives from Mary Tragiani, Karin Catlin, Elissa Shevinksy, Cate Huston, Sarah Szalavitz, and Melinda Byerly as well as Greenhall. Wow, it's a guy talking to women – well done! And Nitasha also has a range of perspectives, including Kelsey Innis’ Medium post, Kelly Ellis, Ellen Chisa, and Anil Dash. Oh and Milo Yiannapolis of GamerGate, who Vivek commiserated with on Twitter.

As Farhad says,

Men who would like to become allies in the fight for women’s equality in tech will find in this story a lesson on how to conduct themselves: Look at the way Mr. Wadhwa behaved when faced with criticism from female technologists. Then do the opposite.

[…] I met in a very social network-y way. Tara Hunt (aka @missrogue) tweeted a link to my blog post Guys talking to guys who talk about guys. Cindy saw it, left a comment, and we connected via Twitter and Facebook and Skype. I was […]